2026-09-18T23:05:42Zhttps://ecommons.cornell.edu/server/oai/requestoai:ecommons.cornell.edu:1813/1121702026-05-15T19:40:18Zcom_1813_35col_1813_47
Ziegler, Henry Thomas
Platt, Verity Jane
Barrett, Caitlín Eilís
Robinson, Cynthia
2022-10-31T16:24:06Z
2022-10-31T16:24:06Z
2022-08
ProQuest Submission ID: 11559
ProQuest Publication ID: 29324073
https://hdl.handle.net/1813/112170
https://doi.org/10.7298/pnqt-qk49
15578984
79 pages
Through the thick affective analysis of a carved ivory horn now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this study traces the millennium-long development of several insidious geographies, a term I use to describe diverse assemblages of material, visual, textual, and intellectual culture entangled with a variety of cultural, political, and economic regimes that perpetuate themselves through naturalizing and aestheticizing the violence they deploy towards pernicious ends. Using a combination of object biography and life history methodologies, I situate the carved horn, a so-called oliphant, within its early life history in the medieval Mediterranean (ca. 750–1792 CE) and its later, documented object biography including its accession into the Met and its role in the development of the discipline of Islamic art history (1792–present). Using the horn itself as well as diverse examples of material, visual, and textual culture of the relevant periods, I demonstrate the horn’s complicity in the creation of medieval and modern pernicious geographies of East and West, simultaneously exposing the insidious mechanisms of action of such geographies. In light of this, the paper calls for a critical reassessment of the term “oliphant” and renewed attention from scholars to the entanglement of the materials of their study, particularly ivory, with such insidious geographies.
en
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
elephant ivory
life history
multisensory archaeology
museum studies
object biography
sound studies
Echoes of Insidious Geographies: The Life History and Object Biography of a Carved Elephant Tusk from the Medieval Mediterranean to the Metropolitan Museum, circa 750 CE to Present
dissertation or thesis
https://newcatalog.library.cornell.edu/catalog/15578984
application/pdf
Archaeology
Cornell University
Master of Arts
M.A., Archaeology
https://hdl.handle.net/1813/59810.2
Publication
Cornell Theses and Dissertations
Ziegler, Henry Thomas
5893a6ea-7af3-41d7-abc6-04bcd26ab5df
open.access
open.access
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<Abstract>Through the thick affective analysis of a carved ivory horn now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this study traces the millennium-long development of several insidious geographies, a term I use to describe diverse assemblages of material, visual, textual, and intellectual culture entangled with a variety of cultural, political, and economic regimes that perpetuate themselves through naturalizing and aestheticizing the violence they deploy towards pernicious ends. Using a combination of object biography and life history methodologies, I situate the carved horn, a so-called oliphant, within its early life history in the medieval Mediterranean (ca. 750–1792 CE) and its later, documented object biography including its accession into the Met and its role in the development of the discipline of Islamic art history (1792–present). Using the horn itself as well as diverse examples of material, visual, and textual culture of the relevant periods, I demonstrate the horn’s complicity in the creation of medieval and modern pernicious geographies of East and West, simultaneously exposing the insidious mechanisms of action of such geographies. In light of this, the paper calls for a critical reassessment of the term “oliphant” and renewed attention from scholars to the entanglement of the materials of their study, particularly ivory, with such insidious geographies.</Abstract>
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